Nextdoor, a leader in this space, has partnered with NYC Mayor Bloomberg to provide Nextdoor services in 1800 existing NYC neighborhoods. It’s a win-win partnership. The city gets a platform that enables them to pinpoint messages that need to get out to certain neighborhoods (such as upcoming events, programs, news, emergency bulletins), and NYC through NYCGov will let New Yorkers know how they can better connect with their neighbors through the Nextdoor platform. (These Nextdoor networks are secure so users have to verify they actually live in a neighborhood to join and users get to control what of this information is public and what is shared privately between neighbors.)

Nextdoor makes it far easier to share information with neighbors (on mobile phones or computers), whether it is about a community issue, or finding a good painter or babysitter, or setting up a block party, or providing other advice or recommendations. Nextdoor is also an example of what Bob Putnam and I call “alloy” social capital that combines virtual and face-to-face elements. We believe that alloy connections are stronger than either the purely virtual social connections in an online gaming community (for instance) and also stronger than purely face-to-face connections. The platform of Nextdoor also makes it more likely that one will meet new neighbors when one follows up on a e-post by inviting a neighbor to coffee, or start waving to or talking with a neighbor who one previously passed silently. And for neighborly relations that already exist, Nextdoor can help strengthen them by increasing the frequency with which one connects with neighbors.

The Nextdoor-NYC announcement, builds on similar announcements with 120 city governments over the last 12 months including cities like San Jose, Denver, Dallas or San Diego. New York City is an iconic city of 8.3 million people and this agreement offers the potential to unlock a lot of social capital so we’ll watch this with bated breath and hope that many other cities will follow NYC’s lead.

It will be interesting down the road to plot out the rise of Nextdoor usage by neighborhood with its impact on social capital measures (e.g., trust of neighbor or borrowing/lending from neighbors) and on putative downstream measures (such as lower crime rate, from the higher level of e-“eyes on the street” to transmute Jane Jacobs‘ pearl of wisdom into the digital age.

I had an interesting conversation with Sarah Leary, co-founder of Nextdoor.

Sarah comes from having worked at epinions (with the other Nextdoor co-founder Nirav Tolia) and discovering how one could capture reputation and trustworthiness online (in terms of ratings) and how people thirsted to compete with one another to be helpful in their comments.

1. Individual social entrepreneurs can apply to launch Nextdoor in a community.

2. The social entrepreneur fills out an application form and if he/she looks like they are serious about this and well integrated in the neighborhoods, they are invited to proceed.

3. The social entrepreneur self-defines their community (using tools that make it easy to incorporate parcels, census blocks, etc.). Ideally a community is between 50 and 200 households. And they are not allowed to choose geography that is already part of another active Nextdoor community. And the social entrepreneur invites his/her friends to join.

4. The Nextdoor community is in a pilot period for 21 days, and if there are not 10 active users by then, the site goes dark and users are told that the site hasn’t achieved sufficient momentum.

4. Anyone joining can see a map of the “neighborhood” and see which houses have or have not already joined. Those on the site have the power to invite others in their neighborhood to join the site (by e-mail, postcard, etc.). A lot of their growth comes from strong word-of-mouth.

They launched in October 2011 and are already in 2100 communities nationwide. Surprisingly, they have found that in order for sites to be viable, it is less important that they get to some percentage penetration of the community but to get to a surprisingly small number of active users.

All users are verified (by phone, by postcard, by address from a credit card, or by neighbor confirmation) that they are in the relevant neighborhood.

As one would expect from social capital theory, they find that people do in general behave surprisingly civilly. [This because participants are highly likely to encounter each other off-line, and those behaving dishonestly are likely to be ostracized or sanctioned.]

Their original motivation for starting the site was to get individuals involved in civic issues, but they found that much of what people wanted to do was discuss crime, or get recommendations, or find local people to sell something. But their anecdotal experience is that these exchanges help forge the social networks that can be activated when civic issues arise. Moreover, they believe that these transactions help reinforce generalized trust of participants in their neighbors.

We’ll look forward to hearing about their lessons and what works well or doesn’t. Obviously, it would be great if they and others succeed in building stronger neighborhood engagement for all the reasons noted in Bowling Alone: better health, lower crime rates, better performing schools and governments, and happier residents.

It remains to be seen what lessons they learn about how online social connections can be maximally used to spur and reinforce face-to-face connections as well.

Peter Davis, Harvard University senior, got motivated to launch OurCommonPlace in 2009 after taking Bob Putnam’s course on social capital. He co-launched OurCommonPlace with Max Novendstern confident that the internet could be utilized to build up American civic life.

CommonPlace is a web-based platform that greatly facilitates local community engagement. It makes it far easier for you to connect with and share information with neighbors and local leaders.

To expand into new cities, they are trying to encourage cities (or local civic sponsors) to invest in the seed costs of launching OurCommonPlace. Those launching costs include sending two young-adult “community organizers” into communities for 2 months knocking on doors and encouraging residents to sign up. Usually by several months they have at least 1000 users and from there word-of-mouth drives interest higher. [They have found that they need about 700 users before there is enough traffic to get to a vibrant critical mass for a site. Note: an alternative, hands-off approach like i-neighbors often finds that they have many sites with only a handful of users and hence the site’s potential is severely limited.]

Residents can find out what’s happening locally or post about local happenings, needs (a good roof repair company, or interest in starting a Boomer ultimate frisbee league, for instance). They can

Ask to borrow a ladder or power drill

Publicize a tag sale or block party

Find out how they can take cooking classes

Ask who has a used loft bed they can have or buy

Find people and organizations with shared interests or hobbies around them

Ask how to fix a pot hole

Find out where their lost cat wandered off to

Organize a service project

Users can connect one-to-one or one-to-many (to their neighborhood or to their town). These one-to-many posts can either be a neighborhood post (e.g., do you have a lawn edger I can borrow, or offering babysitting services, or need someone to help me with my computers.) or a community announcements that notifies the whole town of some upcoming event. Residents can also be e-mailed a weekly summary of key interesting posts and events.

The founders are confident that the social networks formed from exchanging information, trading services or skills, collaborating with neighbors or participating in local events will increase social capital and bring all the attendant benefits (safer streets, better working government, more effective schools, a more vibrant economy, improved public health and happier neighbors).

Another commercial recent entry into this space is Nextdoor (company site here; NY Times article here). Nextdoor was founded by Nirav Tolia (CEO), who formed Epinions in 1999. Video of the Nextdoor service here.

Residents on Nextdoor get a map of their community on the site and can use the site to ask questions, request and share local service recommendations, sell or donate items they no longer need, and help each other in ways that benefit the entire neighborhood, such as, “giving an extra armchair to a neighbor”, getting a recommendation for a new babysitter, organizing a block party, learning about the timing on a construction project. There is no cost for the service.

Nextdoor verifies that people actually live in a neighborhood using one of 4 techniques:

Phone verification. Nextdoor sends an automated phone call with a unique code to verify a new account.

Postcards. Nextdoor sends a postcard to a new member’s address with a unique code that a new user must enter to verify an account.

Credit card billing address. Nextdoor can instantly verify a new member’s home address through a credit card billing address and a $0.01 charge.

Neighbor invitations. A verified member of a Nextdoor neighborhood can vouch for a neighbor by inviting them by email or postcard.

Other folks attempting to use technology to help bring neighbors closer together are Vivek Hutheesing of rBlock and Keith Hampton (of i-neighbors).

I hope that Vivek Hutheesing of rBlock and Keith (of i-neighbors), who both have created very useful software to help us meet and get to know our neighbors, are not taking this personally. As people in the ad business say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.